Verbal Ability – Summary – Privacy-challenged office workers may find
Slot – 2 – VA
Privacy-challenged office workers may find – Video Solution
Q. The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Privacy-challenged office workers may find it hard to believe, but open-plan offices and cubicles were invented by architects and designers who thought that to break down the social walls that divide people, you had to break down the real walls, too. Modernist architects saw walls and rooms as downright fascist. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan would liberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. But companies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than a desire to pack in as many workers as they could. The typical open-plan office of the first half of the 20th century was a white-collar assembly line. Cubicles were interior designers’ attempts to put some soul back in.
Wall-free office spaces did not quite work out the way their utopian inventors intended, as they became tools for the exploitation of labor.
Wall-free office spaces could have worked out the way their utopian inventors intended had companies cared for workers’ satisfaction.
Wall-free office spaces did not quite work out as companies don’t believe in democratic ideology.
Wall-free office spaces did not quite work out as desired and therefore cubicles came into being.
Answer: 1 Solution:
The crux of the paragraph is: Wall-free offices were meant to break down social barriers but were instead used by companies to pack in as many workers as they could and thus exploit them.
Options 2, 3 and 4 do not mention one important facet of the paragraph – that wall-free offices of companies were designed to pack as many workers as they could. Therefore, they were tools of exploitation by companies. They can therefore be eliminated.
Option 1 is the correct summary as this factor has been mentioned.
Hence, the correct answer is option 1.